Recently, network operators have been deploying central control plane architectures in which traffic switching/routing functions and control of the traffic switching/functions are separated into different planes having different types of nodes, namely, a control plane including one or more control nodes and a data plane including one or more data switching/routing nodes. In such central control plane architectures, control plane functions of the control plane may be implemented using general-purpose servers, such that the switches and/or routers of the data plane may only require limited intelligence. For example, two such central control plane architectures that have been proposed include the SoftRouter architecture and the 4D architecture. While such architectures provide various benefits, link failures in such architectures may result in a number of problems. For example, a link failure may cause one or more switches to lose contact with the controller, may result in routing loops between switches, and the like. These scenarios resulting from link failures may cause loss of traffic, generate a large amount of unnecessary traffic in the network, and cause other types of problems. Disadvantageously, however, existing central control plane architectures assume that the controller is always reliable and that the probability of link failures is zero and, therefore, do not address the potential problem of link failures in control plane architectures.